Condition monitoring of plant equipment is important for safely prolonging the life of costly assets. Attempts to monitor the condition of important assets through the interpretation of pertinent sensor measurements have been made within a number of industries. The various sensors and systems designed for this normally produce large volumes of data, all of which must be analysed to make it useful for decision support. Each system typically provides access to its data via a separate bespoke user interface, making it difficult to utilise generic, modular tools capable of automatic data interpretation. Manual analysis is therefore commonplace, requiring skilled personnel to investigate substantial quantities of data from numerous sources.
As a consequence of the need for manual intervention, it is often impossible for data to be monitored in real-time as intended. In addition, data analysis personnel tend to naturally gravitate towards the sole use of certain favoured data sources. This results in large quantities of valuable data being regularly directed to databases for rudimentary storage, thus producing huge, unconnected and unused data silos. Furthermore, these databases may also contain manually entered information, such as maintenance records, which can provide histories, and therefore context, of equipment under scrutiny. Data volume and organisation currently reduce the likelihood of comparison and inference between related data sources, which can provide important insight into the operation of overall systems.
WO 2004/102378 describes an intelligent information dashboard system for collecting, managing, and presenting data and information to allow decision making from real-time information based on data from a number of sources. This system has three functional layers: a top layer, which is a software application, for designing and displaying the information; a middle layer, which is a data management layer for data propagation and aggregation and a bottom layer, the intelligent dashboard agent, for data collecting and processing data. In one example, the top layer of the intelligent information dashboard system is a web-based dashboard module for presentation of the information collected by intelligent dashboard agents and managed by a dashboard management layer. Whilst the system of WO 2004/102378 can provide useful functionality it is limited in that the dashboards presented to the user are pre-set at design time. There is limited flexibility from the user's point of view.